MARCUS (Dragon Security Book 4) (8 page)

I closed my eyes, a teeny trickle of fear moving through me. I’d only been with one man and that had been long ago. And Marcus…he was built much differently than Leon had been. I was afraid and excited and nervous…what if I was a disappointment to him? What if I wasn’t what he wanted?

All these thoughts stormed through my mind in the seconds it took him to grasp his cock and press it to my lips, to urge my lips to open to him. I bit my lip, instinctively pressing back against him. He thrust at the same time I moved. I was so wet that his head slipped easily inside, spreading me open. I held the cold iron so tightly that my knuckles turned white. And then he thrust again and more of him came inside and my body welcomed him, welcomed this touch it had never felt before.

He wrapped his arms around me, his hands slipping over my breasts again. He held me close, my nipples rubbing against his palms, my hips grinding back against his hard body. And then he began to move, thrusting slowly at first, barely moving. Then harder, a little deeper, touching everything all at once. I leaned back against him, twisting my head to graze my lips against his jaw. And his hand moved low against my belly, his fingers pressed against my clit.

I thought I might implode right there and then, just explode all over him, all over this cabin. I pressed my hips back, forcing him to hold on, thrusting against him as much as he was me. It was intense, the feel of him inside of me, the way his body draped itself over me. I wanted to scream, to cry, to simply fall into a puddle of nothing in the center of the bed. His touch was redefining everything I knew about life and love and sex. I wanted nothing more than to be in this moment for as long as I possibly could be.

But he…he was beginning to lose control. His thrusts became harder, faster, his breaths coming in quick gasps. And he was making this low, keening sound that I remembered from last night. He was on the edge. I was over the edge and on my way to oblivion.

He came first, crying out as he buried himself as deep inside of me as he could get. I wiggled my ass, forcing his cock against all the places inside that created the most pleasure. And that, plus his fingers still pressed hard against my clit, sent me soaring.

We fell together a few minutes later, lying in a heap on top of our smashed pillows. I rolled into him and buried my face against his chest.

I had no idea what I was doing. But if it continued to feel like this, then I didn’t suppose it mattered.

Marcus

“What does it mean?” I asked, running my fingertip around the heart on her lower belly.

“Nothing, really. It was an attempt to step outside my comfort zone and do something I wouldn’t normally do.”

“Why?”

“My friend, Lettie, thinks that I’m too introverted. She dared me to do it.”

“So it was a dare?”

“Sort of.”

I ran my finger along the bottom edge of it, letting it get dangerously close to the top line of carefully trimmed hair. She’d shaved herself into something of an arrow, a long strip of hair pointing right to her clit. It fascinated me how this woman—who considered herself an introvert, this woman who’d clearly had few lovers—would do something so erotically pleasing to herself.

I bent and kissed the tip of her nipple, my finger moving slowly back up the length of her belly.

“Is Lettie the woman you were with at the restaurant?”

“Yeah. We’ve been friends since high school.”

“You’re very different.”

“We are. I think that’s what keeps us together. She needs my calm and I need her wildness.”

“Has she ever made you do anything else this wild?”

“I’m afraid getting that tattoo is the wildest thing I’ve ever done.”

“Surely you had a few other experiences. Crazy parties in high school. Frat parties in college.”

“My grandma was sick, and she refused to hire a nurse’s aide, so I spent most of my time nursing her.”

“That sucks.”

She shrugged. “She took me in without thought to what it would mean for her life. I owed her.”

“You were an infant. You don’t owe anyone anything.”

There was steel to my voice. I saw the curiosity in her eyes, but she didn’t ask.

I kissed her chin lightly, my lips sliding down to her throat before I pulled away again.

“What about the tattoo on your back?”

She was quiet for a minute, her fingers playing a little song of her own making across my chest like I was an instrument only she knew how to play.

“It’s the date my mother died. It’s the date that sort of defines me, that chose the sort of life I would have. My grandma…she always reminded me that if my mother had lived, I likely would have grown up moving from place to place, used and neglected by my drug-addicted mother. Instead, I had a peaceful, ordinary upbringing. The tattoo reminds me to be grateful.”

Anger blew through me, burning hot in my chest. I studied her face, realizing she didn’t even understand how cruel it was, her grandma telling her those things. She was an infant. She didn’t make the choice to be born to a woman who couldn’t control her addiction. And she certainly didn’t chose to be left with a woman who was clearly less selfless than she wanted the world to believe.

I wanted to say something, the words on the tip of my tongue. But then she pressed her palm to my tattoo, the only tattoo I ever sat still long enough to get.

“The Marines.”

I nodded. “The Marines.”

“Did you go to Iraq or Afghanistan?”

“I served four tours in Afghanistan.”

Her eyes did that thing they did when she was flush with emotion. “Really?”

“Not as impressive as it sounds. I spent the majority of my time in the carpool. My commanding officer discovered I had a knack with engines, so he put me there to keep the dust and crude out of the engines. It was a full time job.”

“But you kept going back.”

“I did.”

“You must have seen some combat.”

“Some.” I touched that heart again, watching her draw in her breath at the slightest touch of my finger. “But it’s not something I dwell on.”

“When did you get out?”

“A little over six months ago.”

“Did you go home? Visit your family?”

“What makes you think I have family?”

She touched the side of my face, her fingers lingering on my jaw. “Everyone has family.”

I leaned close to her, kissed her nipple again before resting my head on her chest. She ran her hands over my head, caressing me as if I were a child at its mother’s breast. It hurt a little to feel the emotion in her touch, the caring.

I abruptly sat up.

“Don’t count on me, Cadence. I’ll let you down.”

I could feel her eyes on me, following me as I first shoved some more wood into the fire and then as I padded into the kitchen, snatching a couple of water bottles and a bowl of fruit from the fridge.

“I don’t believe you’re a bad person.”

“How could you possibly know that? You know nothing about me.” I turned toward her, gesturing with the hand that held the water bottles. “I shot at you. I could have killed you.”

“But you didn’t.”

“And you think that makes me a good person? Maybe it just makes me a well-trained marksman.”

“And maybe the world is just made up of selfish people who can’t possibly feel empathy for anyone else. We might as well just all give up and set off the atomic bombs, destroy the world and let some other poor fools try it all again.”

“That’s a little drastic.”

She sat up, her full breasts so perky that they seemed to be waving hello.

“I’m telling you that I want to believe you didn’t mean to hurt me. That I want to believe I have no reason to be frightened of you.”

“But you do.”

“Do I? You’ve done nothing but try to care for me since you got here. What about that suggests that my life is in danger?”

I dropped the water bottles on the bed and sat down, bracing myself on a couple of pillows propped up against the headboard. We eyed each other over the bowl of fruit, a blush touching her cheeks as she found it hard to keep her eyes on mine, instead letting them roam the length of my chest.

“I want to believe that this isn’t just some fling to you. That you don’t just routinely bed the women you’re assigned to protect. Or murder, whichever the case might be.”

“What if I did?”

She groaned, throwing herself back against the mattress. I put the bowl of fruit down and climbed over her, leaning close to kiss her jaw. She brushed a piece of hair out of my face.

“Why do you want to be such a mystery?”

“Because you probably wouldn’t like the truth if I told it to you.”

“Why not?”

“Would you admire a man who constantly missed glory by just a hair? A man whose family experienced more tragedy than they ever enjoyed success? Who brought most of that tragedy on themselves?”

“It depends on the man.”

“No, babe, it doesn’t.” I leaned close, grazing my lips over her jaw, whispering next to her ear, “The only thing that matters at the end of the day is that that man ran away when the going got too tough and left his family to face tragedy alone. That man was gone when death came to his family, too ashamed to even return for the funerals.” I kissed her again, gently. “That, my love, is not a good man.”

She wrapped her legs and her arms around me, tugging me down closer to her. “It depends on the man. If he wanted to redeem himself—”

“How do you redeem yourself from that?”

“By living a good life. By loving and being loved.”

I groaned. “You sound like some church lady, or something.”

“I’m not trying to save your soul. I’m trying to keep you from doing something else that you’ll regret for the rest of your life.”

I pulled back and studied her face for a long second. “Why? What if it’s already too late?”

“I don’t think it is.”

I shook my head, “I think you’re too kind. That’s why you should get as far from me as possible.”

But instead of pulling away, I kissed her. Only in kissing her did I feel relief from the guilt she’d been talking about, from the burden I’d carried on my shoulders since I left Chicago for the Marines. Only in kissing her did I believe what she said, did I believe the promise that her body, her touch, the look in her eyes, promised me. It was momentary relief, but it was relief I clung to.

For all this woman knew, I’d been hired to end her life. Yet she opened to me, drew me into her and begged me to touch her, to fill her with all I had to offer. It hurt me to see the marks on her thigh, to feel the stitches under my fingers. I hated to know that I was the cause of that pain. I hated to know that I could inflict so much more harm on her, that I was planning so much pain for her.

What kind of a man was I? How could I touch her like this when I knew what lay in her immediate future?

But I couldn’t quite make myself pull away.

We kissed for a long time, our hands wandering to places that ached to be touched. Then I reached for another of those condoms. Who’d have thought that forgetting I’d shoved some condoms the guys in my unit had given me as a joke upon my discharge in my iPad case would come in handy. I just hoped the fact that they were frozen when I found them wouldn’t cause too much trouble.

So far, so good.

We lay together for a long time, Cadence and me. She fell asleep late in the afternoon and I found myself watching her, wondering what she would think if I told her the truth. I wondered if she would look at me differently if she knew my father was arrested, tried, and jailed for embezzling from his own company? I wonder if she would think me a coward if she knew that by joining the Marines when I did, I left my mom alone not only to face the fallout of my father’s actions, but to deal with my brother’s fight against cancer? And I wondered if she would know what a cold son of a bitch I was that I didn’t come home when my mother couldn’t take it anymore, when she made a decision that could never be reversed. That I no longer had a family, just a couple of graves and a father serving a twenty-year sentence in the federal pen?

Or that, for a long time, I blamed Blake Zimmerman for taking a large role in the demise of my once-promising future.

I slipped my finger over that heart tattoo again, trying to imagine the day she had this done, the man who’d put it there. I wondered how hard that was for her, to sit there and let a stranger touch her so close to the most intimate part of her body.

Cadence was a brave woman. I wasn’t brave.

She deserved someone so much better than me.

Megan

It was late. I was putting away the last of the day’s work, thinking I might enjoy a long, hot bath and a good night’s sleep. That had been something that was elusive these days, since my baby brother started planning his wedding in earnest and his fiancée asked me to be her maid of honor. Who’d have thought that standing next to someone during a simple ceremony could involve so much work? Like I didn’t have enough going on, running a successful security firm, but I found myself making time in my day to pick out flowers and have a dress altered to my tall frame and all these other things that made Amber smile and Cole tell me over and over again what a great sister I was.

The things we do for family.

Sam wasn’t at her desk as I finally pulled my office door closed and locked it.

“Any messages?” I asked one of the girls on the monitoring desks in the bullpen. We hired girls around the clock to field calls from our security clients, the ones who bought our systems because of our willingness to answer their calls whenever necessary. The girl looked up and shook her head.

“Nothing from grosbeak?”

“No, ma’am.”

I was getting a little worried. The storm had passed this morning. Marcus should have been able to at least attempt a call. I was beginning to wonder if something had happened that I needed to know about.

“Sam go home?”

“She’s in the break room.”

I rounded the corner in front of Sam’s desk, wandering down the side of the building that we mostly used for storage at the moment. We’d probably have to expand soon, what with the dozen or so new security clients we got almost daily. But for now most of the rooms were filled with system components waiting to be installed in some home or business. And then there was the small kitchen in the back that we used as a break room.

I heard their voices before I approached the door. Hayden and Sam were whispering about something that I couldn’t quite catch.

Were they engaging in an office romance they didn’t want anyone to know about? Like the entire office didn’t realize the two of them were so head over heels for each other that it was a miracle they could manage to keep their hands to themselves.

“Ready or not, I’m coming in!” I called as I walked around the corner of the door.

Sam blushed, turning her head away. Hayden, standing a good distance from her, had little expression on his face as he watched me come into the room.

“What are you guys doing?”

Sam picked up a coffee cup and went over to the coffee maker. “Just getting more coffee.”

There was something odd going on in here. Hayden mumbled an excuse and left the room.

“Sam, are you okay?”

She glanced over her shoulder at me. “Of course. Why?”

“What were you and Hayden up to?”

“Just talking.”

“About what? You’re usually arguing about the way he teases you. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the two of you have a calm conversation.”

“There’s a first time for everything.”

Sam started out of the room with her coffee and stumbled just as she was about to pass me. I grabbed her arm, keeping her from falling, but not keeping the coffee from spilling over her hands. She hissed, leaning into me briefly.

“Sam—”

She pulled away and went to the sink, rinsing the heat from her hands. I grabbed a towel and held it out to her.

“What’s going on with you? Are you sick?”

She glanced at me. “I’m fine.”

“You’re not, Sam. You’ve had these fainting spells and you’re so tired all the time. And pale.”

“I’m working long hours.”

“If it’s taking a toll on you—”

“I’m fine, Megan. Really.”

“You don’t look fine.”

“Gee, thanks.”

She stole a look at me, amusement hidden behind her glasses.

“You know what I mean.”

She touched my hand. “You know me. You know I wouldn’t lie to you.”

“I know, I just…”

“I’m fine, Megan.”

She picked her coffee up again and started for the door, pausing right at the threshold. “We still haven’t heard from Marcus.”

“I know.”

She nodded. “I figured you did.”

“Go home, Sammie,” I called after her. “You need to get some sleep.”

She just waved her arm, going off down the hall. I knew where she was going. Back to her desk and the corrupted files she knew I desperately needed salvaged. Files I needed desperately enough that I didn’t continue to insist she go home.

I should have.

I went home, fielding phone calls from my parents and Cole, reminding me that the family was getting together this weekend for a pre-wedding family night. Starting a week from today, family would be flying in from all over the country, eager to participate in the wedding festivities.

When I walked through my own door, it was to the sight of Dante putting the finishing touches on a candlelit dinner. The smells of garlic and butter infused the house, a beautiful steak and mound of mash potatoes waiting on each plate.

“You’re right on time,” Dante said, brining me a long stem rose.

“What are you doing?”

“Making you dinner. You need to eat, right?”

“But I thought we agreed that this was just sex.”

“You need to eat to have the energy for sex, don’t you?”

I groaned, but I let him tug me toward the table. I kicked off my shoes as I sat, tucking my feet up under my thighs. Dante sat across from me, this big man folding himself into a tiny chair, daintily unfolding his napkin and setting it on his lap.

“You made all this?”

“I did.”

“How did you know that this is one of my favorite meals of all time?”

“Because you live in Texas.”

I laughed. “Touché.”

I dug into the meal, my thoughts scattered between Sam, the wedding, and Marcus. Sam was a strong person. I’d never seen weakness in her, so these dizzy spells were beginning to frighten me. One or two could be exhaustion, but there’d been more than that. And the pale skin, the dark circles under her eyes? Was I working her too hard?

The wedding was…I hated myself for thinking this, but it brought back too many memories of my own wedding. It was one thing helping Dominic and Amy have a decent wedding, but it was another watching my little brother get married. It was just too close to home, too full of the same things Luke and I had done in preparation of our wedding. We’d done everything—the flowers and the caterers and the baker and the dress and the tux—including the family flying in and the rehearsal dinner. That was the last time I saw him. He looked me in the eye and told me he would see me in the morning. Those were not the words of a man who knew he was in over his head and needed to step back to avoid the clenches of commitment.

Especially not from a man who’d been with me since high school.

It was all just bringing up way too many memories.

“A penny for your thoughts.”

My head jerked up a little too fast. Sometimes Dante’s voice was a little too much like Luke’s. They had this same chocolate smooth baritone that vibrated deep in my bones. I remembered distinctly when Luke’s voice matured, when it was obvious that it was going to be that deep. It was shortly before we began dating my junior year of high school. He was studying Dante’s Inferno in his English class and he came to me for help. I would have been perfectly content to sit at my family’s kitchen table and listen to him read those lines over and over again for the rest of my life.

“You don’t want to know what I’m thinking.”

“It’s okay for you to talk about him in front of me, Megan.”

“No, it’s not. It’s strange. Disloyal, somehow.”

“He’s gone.”

“Physically. But not necessarily emotionally.”

Dante inclined his head. “He left you. He doesn’t deserve your loyalty.”

There was heat behind his words. It made the wall around my heart melt a little. I really didn’t want to fall for this guy, but he was making it so hard for me to keep the emotional distance I’d been struggling with for so long.

“I need you to go to New Mexico in the morning, see if you can locate Marcus and his target.”

He inclined his head, disappointment barely hidden by the movement.

“In the morning,” I repeated, getting up and climbing into his lap. “Tonight, I have a few other things I’d like you to attend to.”

“Yeah?”

I pressed my fingers into his hair, pushing it back from his face. He looked up at me, his eyes partially hooded with desire. I kissed him, wondering if all men knew that little twirl he did with his tongue that Luke once did, that little move that touched things that you wouldn’t think would be a major turn on, but were. And the taste of him, not the garlic and butter in our meal, but the taste beneath all that, the taste that was just him…that was so familiar, too.

Maybe I was just looking for things that I wanted to find. Maybe I was still so deeply attached to Luke that I still found him, felt him, in everything else I did. Even this.

He picked me up and carried me to the bedroom, his hands everywhere all at once. I couldn’t catch my breath, I wanted him so badly. My last thought as he laid me on the bed, as he untucked my blouse and ran his hand underneath was that I needed to move on with my life. I had this perfectly kind, perfectly gentle man here in my bed, yet I was still pining after the one who’d abandoned me. Maybe it was time to stop pining, to accept that my forever had already come and gone. But this temporary life…it had its perks.